The Wedding of the Avatar: The Island of Dragons
by Eduard Tubin
Summary: Azula and Karo escape the wedding of the century but wind up on the Island of the Sun Worshipers. They have to face the same challenge Aang and Zuko faced but unlike those two Azula and Karo may be found lacking


**Tales of the Tea Shop**

**The Island of the Sun Warriors**

"If I told you we are lost what would you say?" Azula had watched the early morning sunrise over the ocean and thought it had come up in the wrong place. The sunrise had a beautiful cascade of red, orange and purple shades but it rose about ninety degrees from where she thought it should have appeared. She nudged Karo to wake him.

"Is that something you are likely to say?" Karo badly needed to go to the bathroom. "I see an island on the horizon."

"We badly need fuel." Azula announced quietly as she pulled the aircraft into a slow descent.

"How much do we have?" Karo yawned as he woke up.

"According to this gauge – none."

"Can you check that?" Karo uneasily scratched his arm.

"I checked it three times already." Azula heard the engine cough and sputter.

"We are going to die." Karo looked at the ocean which sped by far to fast and came up far too quickly for his liking. The engine sputtered to a stop and they began a steep glide.

"Yes we could die." Azula struggled with the controls but spoke calmly. "But then again my plan to keep you away from Koko and Toph worked."

"How does this amount to a plan!?" Karo screamed. "Now we both will die."

"You have to work with what you have." Azula jerked on the controls.

"Do you know some people believe if you live a good life you end up in heaven with seventy two virgins?" Karo yelled out.

"Who do you think plays the role of the virgins?" Azula struggled with the controls. "See! Your career prospects have begun to improve."

"I – wait – how do you know I'm a virgin?" Karo yelled. "I could well no I could not...anyway."

"Lucky guess. We're both dorks." Azula messed with the controls but nothing useful happened. "You don't see rich and hazardous men lining up for a place on my dance card! Crash procedure!"

"What is this 'crash procedure'?" Karo had the presence of mind to use air quotes.

"Grab something solid!" Azula lined up the autogyro with a thin sliver of sandy beach.

"We have a lack of solid stuff to grab!" Karo felt a bone jarring impact as the machine hit the sand at a thirty degree angle making a hundred meter long divot kicking up a wall of fine white sand. Karo held Mitsumi in a death grip.

"Karo?" Azula undid her harness. "You still with us in the mortal realm."

"Yeah. I think so." Karo had his harness undone and tried to open the door on his side. Mitsumi panicked and Karo tried to hush him with comforting words. "If I asked where we are would I really want to know?"

"We landed on an island with ancient ruins." Azula kicked out the window on her side. "Sound familiar to you?"

"No....but lets hope all the natives have friendly intentions and a telegraph." Karo struggled to make it to Azula's side which faced up and allowed him to escape. "We could call this our honeymoon."

"I need to pee." Azula announced in a statement that seemed completely at random.

"Arrive on a mysterious island and urinate on it – a plan." Karo realized he had a full bladder and empty stomach.

"Karo?" Azula stood up a minute later when she heard a twig snap.

"This place looks like a dump." Karo replied.

"I heard something." Azula shouted back.

"Comforting." Karo went back to the autogyro to retrieve their possessions.

As an island it looked tropical with a white sandy beach around it, a ruined city inland and a spine of rocky mountains. As uninhabited islands went it seemed obvious to Karo that it offered very little in the way of food or better yet hotels with nice rooms. He stacked their knapsacks and examined the city that stood in the distance. It looked dead and the stone buildings looked old and many of them had fallen apart. As for who once lived their Karo and Azula had no clue but the stone buildings showed signs of an advanced culture but Azula concluded that they had long ago closed up shop and probably left to find a larger island.

"Come on." Azula patted Karo on the shoulder. "We have a city to explore."

"You do know I had no interest in Toph or Koko." Karo followed behind Azula and narrowly missed being struck on the head by a coconut which made a loud thud and rolled down the hill. "If you want to have me all to yourself on a deserted, isolated island your plan came together."

"Actually I screwed up and crashed on a deserted island but.." Azula held back a branch. "Still want to marry me?"

"Well you have made my life interesting." Karo smiled.

The city looked ruined. Light brown sandstone had delicate carvings but Karo and Azula had no idea who the builders could have been. The center of the city had a huge pyramid complex and Mitsumi chattered nervously. Karo behaved relatively bravely – he did not think the dearly departed tax base of the city meant them any harm. Azula kicked a rock down a stone paved street which had not seen traffic in a thousand years.

"Remarkably well crafted." Karo brushed a stone wall. "Ugly but well crafted."

"Fire benders built this." Azula stood in front of a huge mural which had a dragon theme of some sort.

"Wow these people did ugly well." Karo looked up at the mural and ran his hand over it. "What are the chances of anyone finding us?"

"Fire Lord Zuko will want his autogyro back." Azula sounded less than confident. "Sun Warriors!"

"The what the who now?"

"Our Fire Nation ancestors." Azula put her arm around Karo's neck. "Many centuries ago a tribe of fire benders lived here, learned fire bending from the dragons but they vanished maybe a thousand years ago. This is all that remains of their city."

_Click!_

* * *

"You're that sure they're dead?" Karo asked sarcastically as the stars cleared from his vision. Karo found himself in a stone cell with a grate in the roof that let in some light. "Who booby traps a street?"

"I landed on my head when we fell down that chute." Azula lay her head on Karo's lap. "Any idea how to escape?"

"Well it involved not winding up in a stone prison." Karo played with Azula's bangs.

"My boyfriend has an oboe and is not afraid to use it!" Azula had to give herself time for an unexpected outburst. "Probably only a third rate symphony orchestra anyways!"

"What if bad musicianship carries a death sentence...." Karo watched as a part of the wall slide open and a stern overweight man with red and white face paint stood before them.

"Princess Azula and her charming consort Karo Zhao." The man stared down at Karo as he cowered behind Mitsumi. "I wonder why you have come here."

"Blatant stupidity." Azula answered promptly. "Combined with bad navigation and well you can work out the rest."

"Ran out of gas." Karo added.

"Randomly pressed buttons." Azula coughed. "And crashed. Shouldn't the Sun Warriors be dead?"

"We have hidden from the outside world to preserve our culture and protect the purity of fire bending." The fat man spoke solemnly.

"As you know our names you must know we arrived by accident." Karo stifled a sneeze and tried his best at sycophancy. "I'm a coward and I am not proud so if we promise to leave and not rat on you would you let us free?"

"You must face the Masters and they will judge you. They will look deep into your souls and they will destroy you if you are found unworthy." The fat man stroked his goatee like beard. "If you are indeed worthy you will receive the secret of all fire bending. If you prove unworthy well we don't discuss such nasty things in civilized company."

"Well....we're boned, screwed, up the creek without a paddle, resigning our breathing privileges." Azula muttered. "Worthy? The Masters will judge us worthy?"

"Indeed." The fat man turned and left through the hole in the wall which closed up.

"What makes us 'unworthy'?" Karo sat down.

"Look up our listing in _Who Is Scum_." Azula patted him on the back. "Any idea who the Masters might be?"

"I have my mind fixated on my imminent death." Karo said nervously. "Unless we luck out and find out the Masters do fancy stone carving, sell it in the gift shop and these people tell scary tales just to keep the resort developers away."

* * *

"Did you catch any of that?" Karo held out his orange flame as they crawled up the side of a double peaked mountain. They had received a piece of the 'Eternal Flame' but neither Karo or Azula really cared about the ceremony that seemed to surround this event. Karo feared that the Masters might want to kill a free market economist for the sheer joy of it. "Present my fire? If I told you I do not want to do this and want to curl up in a little ball would you lose all respect for me?"

"If I die you can't go out with Koko!" Azula answered in an attempt to hide her own fear and to let her friend Karo know she still cared.

"I badly need an attorney." Karo had to concentrate on his fire.

"If you die I won't find much joy in life." Azula held out her hands and her blue flame grew out of it. "What will you do if the Masters kill me?"

"We have to see it doesn't come to that." Karo looked down. "Too awful to contemplate. You make my life so interesting."

Azula didn't understand why Karo had any concerns – few people had such nice souls – if people had souls. She had no certainty on that point. Few people could have a more decent soul and a kinder disposition. She worried about herself for she had done a number of dodgy things as part of her rampage through the Earth Kingdom and the taking of Ba Sing Se. She had a cruel and jealous streak and knew that describing herself as insensitive to human suffering amounted to the equivalent of calling a nuclear blast a loud pop.

"These people have the technological sophistication of cave men." Azula kicked a large palm tree which shook and dropped a large and strange looking melon like fruit that broke open revealing red flesh and a stench of rotting meat.

"How does that help us?" Karo sensed a people that had chosen to remain the same not primitive or backwards but to preserve their way of life.

"It doesn't." Azula held out her flame as she climbed up the narrow trail. "Just venting. You have no problems – you have never hurt anyone. I have had endless trouble warping you and it still hasn't worked."

"I have my own warped nature." Karo clamored up a rocky slope. "I want to become an economist after all."

"We're are so screwed." Azula looked up the mountain. "I hope the Masters realize we have our lives ahead of us and if given a chance would work in those thrift shops that raise money for drug addicts."

"You would?" Karo held out his hand and stared down at his fire but sounded astonished.

"No." Azula walked ahead of Karo. "But maybe I can con the Masters."

"Wow!" Karo saw a huge ceremonial stage in a crater in the mountains with a sun themed rock inlay on the floor. The Sun Warriors had assembled there and looked very pleased with themselves as they waited for their guests. "Do you notice how many of them are fat?"

"I had not pondered that." Azula walked slowly down while Karo stumbled after her with Mitsumi cowering on his shoulder. "Any chance this is a football pitch?"

"Why would half the players wind up fat if they exercised?" Karo found the size of the place astonishing and he had seen what he considered many astonishing things including many of the proud monuments of Ba Sing Se. Unlike those monuments this one lacked pigeon crap. A large stone bridge stood hundreds of meters over their heads and Karo could not think of what possible purpose it could serve but then again the events of this day had caused his internal 'make sense of reality' faculty to crash and blink 12:00 midnight. He had no commitment to the sacred art of fire bending but he had enough intelligence to know the Sun Warriors had no desire for unwelcome outside contact and planned to silence them in some hideous way.

"Now this may prove deadly." The fat chief said as the duo approached. "You have both come from families that have done great harm to the world."

"Yes.....well you're fat and ugly." Azula held out her fire. "It would seem that if you had more courage then you could have done something to stop the Fire Nation but instead chose to hide out on this island. Why do we have to endure your trials? We landed here by accident and we would go but you won't let us leave."

"If we let you go without knowing the content of your soul, your heart and your ancestry then how can we trust you to keep our secret?" The fat chief spoke didactically. "We have to know so you will meet the Masters. You must ascend the steps."

"Oh we are so dead." Azula muttered. "Any bright ideas Karo?"

"Uh...panic?" Karo faced the same problem with his reasoning faculties that he faced with his 'making sense of reality' one and he felt like barfing all over the place.

"Chanters!" The chief gave the command.

"I had a rather surprising escape plan." Azula approached the steps which seemed to steep to prove safe.

"Cunning and surprising escape plan?" Karo began climbing along side Azula. "What do you have in mind?"

"I don't know – the plan escaped." Azula looked at Karo. "Do you believe in life after death?"

"I have never died before." Karo had never regarded his death as anything but a distant certainty in sixty or seventy years time – assuming health care advanced to treat some of the nastier cancers. He felt the delusion of his youthful immortality slipping away and gulped. "Do you believe in life after death?"

"I'll give you the answer after I die." Azula and Karo stepped onto the platform that stood at the top of the bridge and held out their fire.

"Summon the Masters!" The chanting stopped and a huge noise grew from giant horns hidden in the mountainside. Whatever else Azula thought of the Sun Warriors they did nothing on a small scale. Karo gave up and began having his calculus classes flash back in his mind. He figured that if this was indeed the end then any all powerful being could feel the pain of reading his mind as he did calculus.

"I hear something." Azula poked Karo. "Have your flame ready."

"The Rule of Quotients...." A dragon flew past Karo as he whispered that profound lesson. A blue dragon followed by a red one (Karo had ceased trusting his eyes). Azula saw the dragons and her first thought was simply 'didn't we kill them all'? Things had not begun well if indeed these creatures could read minds.

"Didn't we kill them all?" Azula whispered to Karo.

"Tell them that." Karo hunched down while Mitsumi in an act of artistic self preservation figured out his humans were completely screwed and decided to find others to feed him. He ran down the stairs, flew off and figured out that a bush a kilometer and a half away constituted minimum safe distance.

"Do they expect us....to do something?" Karo backed into Azula.

"I hope it involves hauling ass out over that group of chanters." Azula had no clue what a dragon could want. The dragons has some invisible means of communication and decided that these fire benders could not take the hint to dance and decided to push the agenda further ahead. Unlike the Avatar and Prince Zuko these fire benders seemed a bit clueless with regards to the proper respect to show dragons. The dragons had important judging to accomplish and then had a fine dinner planned and so decided to get on with things. They settled down on the stone wall on either side of the stairs and stared at the two panicky humans.

"Are we dead yet?"

"How would I know Azula?" Karo waited as the dragons stared at them. "I have never been dead and have no frame of reference. My life hasn't flashed before my eyes but my life has hardly begun. I keep wishing I had paid more attention to it."

"They keep staring at me. One of them has a slight lazy eye."

"They have begun to do something......oh crap!" Karo held his hands over his head as a wash of multicolored light and a roar like the endless detonation of bombs seemed to crash over him.

Azula looked up in the light and utterly missed the point of the entire exercise but she checked her hands and they remained attached by her arms and shoulders. She had figured on having fewer limbs coming out of that exercise than she had going in but the limb count remained constant.

Karo looked up into the light and saw something amazing and that held the key to the profound mysteries of fire bending. Unfortunately the sheer terror and the manner in which it had utterly shut off his higher faculties meant he missed the point and assumed he had become a ghost or a spirit or gone to the Great Treasury – where economists went. When he looked again the dragons had left and he looked at Azula who looked back as baffled as before.

Azula had not died and concluded that was about as good an outcome as she could expect. She had grown up believing that fire bending drew its power from sheer dogged will. Anything contrary to those beloved assumptions made no sense to Azula and so she rejected it out of hand as utter nonsense. She held onto her beloved assumptions with all the tenacity of an impacted wisdom tooth and she began to walk down the stairs with Karo.

"Well?" Karo looked at Azula for some confirmation that he had just experiences what his brain had told him he had seen.

"We could have had the same vision with the help of some well chosen mushrooms." Azula walked down the long stairs. She looked past the chief who awaited them. "Can we go now?"

"The Masters have found both of you....." The chief had these kinds of sermons prepared and when Azula and Karo walked past him he found it a bit of a surprise. "Wait! I put a lot of work into these speeches!"

"The Masters found both of us...?" Azula snapped back. "Inedible because of high lead levels? Stressed? We didn't chose to land in this hellhole. Even Karo looks a bit tweaked. His left eye twitches."

"Worthy." The chief said quietly.

"Do we get a third place bronze bowling trophy?" Azula had quieted down.

"How do we get off this hellhole – no offense?" Karo bowed to the chief.

"I have an idea but we need to discuss it." The chief spoke quietly and stroked his goatee.

* * *

"Who is Ran?" Azula asked as she met the chief that afternoon. The ancient ruins took on a life once more and Sun warriors having had their ceremonies made their way to a square in the center to celebrate.

"Didn't you listen to me?" The chief scolded the Princess. "Ran is one of the dragons."

"I didn't think we would get quizzed by you later on." Azula protested. "If you had said – memorize the tripe I am spewing because you will be quizzed on it then I might have stood a chance. Given our day thus far I assumed it would end when I heard the words 'Welcome to hell – we've been expecting you two. As much anticipated guests we hope you find your stay infernal as well as eternal.'"

"Well I have some good news and some bad news." Karo returned with Mitsumi on his shoulder and a palm frond in his hand which he used as a fan. "The good news - the autogyro cannot be fixed under any circumstances."

"And this by you is good news!?" Azula grabbed Karo by the neck. She liked Karo deeply but the man had a gift for understatement, not cluing in and humbling but ingenious cowardice.

"Well I didn't want to cause any undue worry." Karo said timidly. "Unless you can weld metal, rebuild an aircraft engine and machine aluminum we can't fix the autogyro."

"Ran may agree to take you to a sparsely populated Fire Nation island and you can find your way home from there." The chief said with infinite patience.

"Ran owns a boat or something?" Karo dropped the palm frond. The solemn chief took on a vexed look and felt the struggle between the urge to strangle the young man for being clueless or the young woman for her audacious arrogance.

"Ran is one of the dragons." Azula crossed her arms. "He may agree to fly us to the Fire Nation."

"Dragons? They have not seemed the least bit hospitable." Karo had thought the dragons had gone extinct due to Sozin and he had witnessed the equivalent of seeing a therapod dinosaur meekly pass in front him. Karo still had trouble with bits of his mind not quite responding as expected which he knew would require a therapist to dig in and debug his code. He had lost track of time and only half believed he still lived. He wondered to himself if he did die if someone would politely inform him or assume he already know or perhaps not let him know to spare him the shock. "And does anyone here know how to make tea?"

"Does he bite?" Azula asked the chief as they entered the cavern where Ran lived. The dark cavern seemed to lack the human remains she had expected but it had a full share of gloom and dampness. Karo held out a lantern as the chief led them down a partly eroded stone staircase full of loose stones – dragons evidently didn't worry about falling. "Of course he bites. Every living thing in the natural world bites with the exception of the sponges."

"Oh geez." Karo hid behind Azula. "I saw something glowing in the dark!"

"Mitsumi." Azula smacked Karo's head while the chief led the way. "His eyes glow green in the dark."

"Who owns the glowing orange ones the size of dinner plates?"

"You have Mitsumi on your shoulder don't you?" Azula looked back and saw the lemur staring ahead. "Oh dear."

"Indeed."

"May I present Ran the Master Fire Bender!" The chief held up his arms and produced a circle of flame that showed the blue face of a dragon with canine teeth the size of Karo and Azula.

"I hope his eyes key off motion." Azula said.

"He can see you as clear as day." The chief wore a nasty and fiendish smile.

"Can't you say anything somewhat reassuring?" Azula scowled. "Your civilization never invent the simple workable falsehood?"

"Ran started breathing down on my monkey." Karo announced as Ran breathed on him with nostrils the size of his waist.

"We have started calling it that?" Azula spoke quietly as the chief seemed to engage in the kind of silence that allowed him to talk to dragons.

"He agrees but he must return soon to be with his wife." The chief announced. "We are expecting a blessed event in the next few weeks. She is expecting!"

"When do we leave?" Karo held onto Mitsumi who had grown nervous. He had decided to think about economics in case Ran had decided to read his mind. In that way Ran found out about the 'velocity of money' or the the rate at which 'money' flowed through the economy. Azula had her thoughts fixed on the Chief with thoughts that ran from 'shirtless despot' to 'I wish I could choke the fat bastard for making us go through all of this'. Ran decided to ignore both of the Fire Nation denizens thoughts to avoid dealing with them on a mental level.

* * *

"Our flight is late." Azula and Karo waited at the top of the stairs for Ran to pick them up. The chief of the Sun Warriors had somehow managed to negotiate passage for them although neither Karo or Azula had any idea how he had done this. They sat on the ground with their gear in the baking late afternoon sun as Mitsumi ran around and chattered like a bad tempered child.

"Maybe Ran went back on the deal." Karo tapped the stone floor as he sat on the top of the stairs.

"They don't want us around." Azula paced the bridge making slow, small circles as she paced. "You have any idea how much of a pain in the behind we are?"

"You truly deserve each other." The chief came up the stairs having heard Azula's remark. "Your flight will depart shortly. We have had the odd visitor over the years but few have complained more eloquently about this place than you two."

"You lack plumbing." Azula glanced at her nails. "And for an ancient civilization you really don't have any good crap to steal."

"You mistreat the tourists." Karo would have taken them for the French if he had any knowledge of Europe. "The island has a nice climate but the accommodations suck."

"Your guest accommodations will receive very low ratings in the travel guides." Azula looked on grimly as Ran slid up to the other side of the stone bridge and waited patiently.

Ran looked blue or rather kind of purple pink – Karo could not really decide since parts of his brain still had not quite decided how to decode color. He moved as silent as a thief in the night as he hovered. Azula thought he looked like a rather disturbingly real Chinese dragon without the half drunken New Year's celebrants hoisting the costume in the air and dodging fireworks.

Book Four records that Book One through Three would become wildly popular when a Fire Nation cable specialty channel produced an animated version. A Water Tribe Network had produced an earlier version with puppets and 'Supermarionation' but that had limited commercial success. Academics condemned both versions as a debasement of history and they did not solve the problems of the dragon, their real color and their identity. The Earth Kingdom History Channel did air the animated series with odd mix ups in the order of episodes. The Water Kingdom had no cable systems but had three channels belonging to the state which aired Book One in prime time, Book Two after the Eleven O'clock Daily News on TV3 and half of Book Three between infomercials at half past three in the morning.

"I have never been to the Fire Kingdom before." Karo spoke excitedly. "I will finally see my homeland and maybe my ancestral land."

"Board the dragon." Azula said blandly and grabbed Karo's hand to hoist him on Ran's back. She grabbed one of his massive horns while Karo took a death grip on the other. He looked down and saw the rocks and surf many hundreds of meters below him and gulped. Mitsumi had a better head for heights but had his arms around Karo's neck.

"When I enter the Fire Nation do I need a phrase book?" Karo waited for Ran to lift off or take off or do whatever he thought a dragon might do. Azula slugged him for that remark.

"Holy *&^*!" Karo uttered. Ran seemed to leap away from the ground. An airship rose, Appa gracefully fell away from the ground and even the autogyro could not achieve sufficient velocity to put much stress on the human frame. Ran took off like a Soyuz rocket and indeed looked a great deal like one. Azula thought – probably correctly – that Ran did this to freak the living daylights out of both of them. Ran began to pitch over slowly at a speed that seemed insane and Karo puked.

"Do you trust this creature?" Karo saw the ocean far below and felt the air thin out and rush by him. Mitsumi grabbed his neck tighter and he began to choke.

"Me?" Azula looked calm but she dare not let go of Ran's horn. "I trust him about as much as I trust a cigarette company executive."

Ran had agreed to take the humans back to civilization because as he had found out the male had a good heart but seemed somewhat thick. He didn't understand the true secret of fire bending came from the energy of life but he had mastered the art of bitching. The female had a miserable and lonely childhood as the Princess and at her tender age deserved a second chance to use her brilliant intellect. She failed to catch on to the true secret of fire bending but had mastered the art of cynicism. Ran and Cha had given up any hopes of teaching them and merely wanted to rid themselves and their people of the duo. The dragons knew the two formed a close couple and that they would prove insufferable if they hung out with the Sun Warriors for any length of time. The male complained about everything – the lack of comforts, the lack of shopping and the lack of plumbing. The female had no social skills and regarded almost everyone as an intolerable idiot. She even regarded her mate as a bit of a moron at times. One would prove annoying, but both of them combined in a synergistic way to become annoying at levels unseen except in whole body rashes. Ran and the chief realized they wanted no part of either of them and so dumping them on a remote island of the Fire Nation would rid them of two massive irritants. Ran also possessed a degree of mercy and knew Karo and Azula loved each other deeply and probably could not live without each other.

After a surprisingly short flight he landed on a barren heap of an island next to a demolished wartime factory. Karo tumbled off one side with Mitsumi flying to a perch on a rock nearby. Azula jumped delicately off the other side. With not a single breeze the dragon took off and in a moment became a vanishing speck.

"I had expected more trees and that village in the distance looks squalid." Karo felt Mitsumi climb on his shoulder and he surveyed the grassy landscape. "I see boats in the water."

"I wonder what hit this place?" Azula picked up a broken and pitted piece of aluminum.

"Some kind of union strife?" Karo knew they had landed on a Fire Nation island because the Fire Nation emblem stood on the partially destroyed wall of the smelter. He had expected less destruction, nicer homes, rice paddies, volcanoes and above all else trees. "We have a village in the distance so lets find a place to stay."

"Have you noticed how every place we have wound up looked backward and primitive." Azula followed Karo and picked her way along the trail that followed the river bank.

"Quaint." Karo corrected.

"Hello I'm Dock." An old and somewhat demented man pulled up to shore in an old and somewhat unreliable looking boat. "I operate the ferry! Can I help you two important looking Fire Nation people?"

"How many skin diseases do you think this man accepts as normal?" Azula stood about ten meters from the river bank and eyed the man with contempt. "Remind him we are not aid workers coming to teach them how to read, convert them to religion or bring anti malaria drugs."

"We are taking a long tour of our homeland. We have no religion to offer – not that you would want that." Karo cleared his throat and Mitsumi chirped. "We have come to see how other Fire Nation citizens live and report to the Fire Lord. May we stay the night?"

"And the girl? She looks familiar.....could it be the famous actor Ming Ku who played the Avatar in the play 'Boy In the Iceberg?" Dock's eyes widened as he completely misidentified Azula.

"Yeah." Azula said. "Go with that. May I ask if we can buy some food?"

"You may have all the fish you desire." Dock waved to his boat in a friendly manner. "My brother Xu sells fish."

"How nice." Azula knew her experience with fish involved hives, choking and a series of shots to bring her out of anaphylactic shock. "Dinner could prove exciting."

Dock rowed them over to the village standing on stilts in the middle of the river. Karo had never seen anything so primitive in his life. Azula began to itch thinking about fish and she had not seen anything so bucolic – the polite word for impoverished – as she stepped along the crudely built wooden walkways.

"Karo?" Azula said quietly. "I itch."

"Uh...?" Karo blushed as he noticed Dock listening in. "Is that a euphemism for something?"

"No!" Azula now held Mitsumi on her shoulder and wanted to slug her boyfriend. "This is a fishing village and I do not get on well with fish as you know."

"Wowwee! You should have seen this place a few years ago when the factory moved in." Dock knew he spoke to sophisticated city folks which in his mind meant some kind of unwanted progress but he remained polite. Azula tried to blot out the smell of fish as she traveled past a crudely built house with an open fire cooking some kind of trout. "Say you guys didn't come here to build something?"

"No....we had no idea they had built an aluminum smelter." Karo actually found the smell of fresh fish cooking on an open fire quite appealing. "We want to find a steam liner or some other way of returning home to Ba Sing Se. It has been a very long day."

"Our patron goddess destroyed that plant because it polluted our river." Dock took on a tone of warning and began to sound serious and not insane. "The Painted Lady protected us by destroying the factory."

"She destroyed the smelter?" Azula remarked without much interest. Most war time industries had long shut down as new privately owned companies located them close to customers. During the War the Fire Nation placed crucial plants in locations designed to hide them from prying spies. Azula knew aluminum production needed bauxite – the red dirt they saw all over the countryside and they needed electrical power. She assumed a dam up the river made power and the smelter dumped its waste in the river to flush it away. As typical with most war industries no one gave any thought to the fate of the locals or safety of the workers. It looked to her like a fire destroyed the plant – hardly supernatural or worth any investigation. The locals took the destruction as a sign from their Gods and she decided to leave it at that.

* * *

"I still itch." Azula sat on the large open wood walkway next to Karo with a bowl of rice. She felt the smell of fish cooking, curing, smoking and salting. Azula had a purely psychosomatic reaction to the smell but she had a very real and possibly deadly allergic reaction to anything piscine.

"Dock said he will take us down the river to a village at its mouth and we might find travel there." Karo had spent time with Mitsumi wandering the village and staging amusing mime acts for the children. The evening twilight seemed very dark to both of them as they had become used to the gas lighted streets of Ba Sing Se – they both missed that greenish yellow glow which to them signified progress and comfort.

"Dock is insane."

"I know." Karo felt a cold breeze blow across the village. "But he owns the boat so do we have a choice?"

"Stating facts." Azula and Karo huddled closer. "If we wind up feeding the fishes or sharks on the bottom of this river – don't whine to me."

"We missed out on the Avatar's wedding." Karo kissed Azula on the cheek.

"The newsreel cameras will capture it all for us." Azula kissed Karo's cheek. "And is being with me so bad?"

"No....no." Karo put his arm around Azula's waist. Azula placed her empty bowl of rice and her chopsticks down. "So this is true love?"

"No....you're just happy to see me."

"Oh sorry." Karo sounded embarrassed and pulled out a roll of Earth Kingdom coins from his clothing. "I am happy to see you – hope I didn't poke you. I will admit I feel a bit clumsy at this 'romance stuff'."

"You have a nice warmth and the night is cold and I am happy." Azula pressed her head next to Karo's and hugged him. "I have never had anyone hold me. I have never had anyone like me or spend time with me without fearing me."

Karo and Azula enjoyed their own kind of company until an elderly villager came and brought them indoors and gave them reed mats on the floor of his hut. The hut had few furnishings, used ax carved logs as studs and the villager and his wife slept in a room on the second floor. A small oil lamp lit the interior but did little to beat back the dark. Karo could hear the river slapping against the poles that held up the small house. Azula could smell wet and mold. Azula fell asleep straight away and used Karo's chest as a pillow. She snored loudly but smelled faintly of bittersweet vanilla and this struck Karo as the most welcome combination as he fell slowly to sleep.

* * *

"Here we go at a fast heart stopping speed of three clicks an hour?" Azula stepped delicately into Dock's boat as Karo and Mitsumi followed behind.

"What?" Karo shouted since his hearing had not quite recovered from Azula's night long snoring serenade.

"Lovely boating weather!" Dock sat at the front of his boat with an oar in the water ready to leave once his guests had finally taken their seats. The weather was in fact lovely – hot and sunny – Dock had some of his faculties left. "Dock couldn't make it because he has to operate the ferry – I'm Bushi and I will take you down the river."

"Identical twins?" Karo sat carefully on the unpainted wooden seat carefully making sure he did not get a sliver. Mitsumi hid under a tarp beneath the seats.

"Dementia of some sort." Azula expected madness and found it everywhere. She assumed that once she had worked something out about the universe it would perversely change into something more complex and odder.

Bushi pushed off and let the current of the river carry them away from the village. The boat rocked in the slight current but the river did not look like the kind of river to pose much of a threat. Karo could see the bottom of the river – tufts of seaweed grew on rocks off the bottom, the odd silver fish swam by and some kind of clam or mussel grew in colonies on the rocks below the water. Bushi seemed adept at steering the boat as they had avoided hitting anything although at the speed they traveled the impact might go unnoticed.

"We may not have to travel to Ba Sing Se." Azula lay at the bottom of the boat to keep the heat of the day off of her. "The Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom tectonic plates may bump into each other by the time we reach civilization and we can cross on foot. We have gone from traveling supersonically on a magical being to traveling geologically on this skip."

"You met someone who sings worse than I do." Karo manned the steering oar and as the current carried them down river he noticed more trees and signs of a rather sparse tropical forest. Bushi or Dock had taken to singing the village songs as he let the river carry him downstream. Large steam powered machines made worse noises usually prior to a boiler explosion but then again they put a good deal of effort into sounding horrid. In comparison Karo's singing proved tame. If Karo sang and made Azula feel slightly irritated then Bushi's singing struck her as the auditory equivalent of a taser or pepper spray to the face.

"Bushi?" Azula spoke in a grim voice and really wished she had a gun to shoot Bushi and dump him off the side of the boat to vanish without a trace or to shoot herself and end the singing. Bushi ignored her and kept singing.

"Karo!" Azula kicked him. "Say something!"

"About what!"

"The howling noise our ship captain keeps emitting." Azula held her ears.

"Mitsumi seems to enjoy it!"

"He likes eating mosquitoes." Azula answered. "I think you should seek a more qualified opinion."

"It's his boat." Karo did not find the singing annoying but rather 'ethnic' in the way it picked the scales it selected. He didn't really notice but he didn't notice the flat notes and mangled melodic lines he produced with the oboe. Karo considered music something he could not do well and like the bad carpenter never noticed the work of other bad carpenters he didn't notice bad singing. Azula had a refined ear for Fire Nation music. Fire Nation music picked keys in the minor scales, played off large scale orchestras and made use of the march beyond whats good taste permitted. Serious composers of music fled or hid their best work for the day the oppressive age of the Fire lord ended – until then they wrote massive military marches played on as many brass instruments, side drums and bells as possible. One Fire Nation composer wrote his Symphony in Praise of the Fire Lord – in F Minor – for forty trumpets, twenty trombones, countless horns and used two giant bass drums. The Fire Lord of the time – Azulon – loved it. The musicians all went deaf and could not hear the obligatory call for encores.

"Is that a Fire Nation estate?" Azula saw olive vineyards growing on a hillside protected by a small stone fence with a small farmhouse in the midst of the green orchard.

"Yes." Bushi said cheerily. "We will be at the mouth of the river soon. We trade fish with these people."

"I see." Azula took comfort in the familiar nature of the landscape. She saw orchards, and farms begin to take over the hills and the landscape began to look 'civilized' by her standards. They rounded a bend in the river and she saw a massive steel bridge with a locomotive puffing across it and she felt at home. Karo had seen his first sight of the industrialized Fire Nation civilization and took it all in: he had no memory of his Fire Nation home. Bushi pushed his boat toward a dock to let off his passengers.


End file.
